Baraka_Guru

This is a what-if situation. I would make the same mistake if I countered with my own:

Which would you be more thankful for? Being unarmed and getting home safely, or accidentally shooting yourself in the gut while reaching into your pocket for a stick of gum?

Let's keep this rooted in realism. In my case, in the city of Toronto, even in a record year with a spike in gun-related homicides (2005), there were under 100 homicides (71, I think). In a city 2.5 million, what were my odds of being such a victim?

Comparatively, Chicago had 450 murders in 2004 for a population of 2.8 million. Now, Chicago is often referred to as the murder capitol of America. If all things were equal, my odds of being murdered in this city is around 6 times greater than it is in Toronto. The gun-control differences between Toronto and Chicago are astounding, I'm sure. Nevertheless, does 1 murder out of 6,200 people make you that worried where you would need to carry a gun? If you moved to a town of 60,000 people and you had heard that 10 people were murdered the previous year (not all gun-related deaths, mind you), would you rush out to buy a gun just in case bullets fly in your small-town grocery store? You would want to be prepared to return fire, right?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot